Unless attacks take down infrastructure regularly, we won't go back to decentralized model. The internet itself was created decentralized to withstand a a war .

No, the ‘internet’ was created to allow US defence researchers to access shared computers more easily. It adopted the packet switched model that had been developed theoretically to support command and control applications, but which was never actually implemented by the extant C2 providers (in a dentist’s waiting room now so don’t have links)

I dunno, I have been around and I never seen an on-prem infra being more reliable than your average cloud.

The only difference is that when on-prem goes down you can shout to your infra engineers, when cloud goes down you shout at your enterprise cloud representative. The first is more effective, but even with that it still doesn't achieve the same reliability and disaster-recovery of your average cloud provider.

It also has the property of being less correlated with other failures, which may or may not be an advantage.

With small events cloud engineers scale better, with large events local engineers scale better.

I have never seen an on-premise environment down as much as Azure is.

It’s a general political trend too: de-globalization. Everyone sold the idea of globalisation and off-premise ethereal globalized cloud services. Both good when they work, but a total disaster when they don’t.

Decentralization is the way.

There’s a reason that I admire the federal system of the US:

For all the US’s problems, devolving critical functions to layers of differing granularity has proven surprisingly robust to many faults.

I suspect we’ll see economic equivalents, where critical functions are spread around at various scales. We dont need to be either totally globalized or totally domestic.

Do you admire federated system of Germany too? They famously have many department operating semi-autonomous, causing immense friction in adopting any new changes. Do you admire federated system EU? Where countries can run unchecked for years and it is very hard to fix issues in any specific member country.

I'm not criticizing any country or union here, and not praising them. I merely highlighting that maybe federation on its own is not the main cause of success of USA and there are some other more important factors at play.

When you centralize updates you get the outage which is the subject of discussion.

Or the Four Pests campaign.

Except that anything local will be more expensive than anything globally scaled, and the same people complaining about globalization "suddenly" don't want to pay more for the same.

It's not like alternatives for MS services doesn't exist for decades. There smaller and more people friendly hostings, email services, file shares, office software etc. The problem is that people complaining about MS services don't wan't to use them or pay for them.

“More expensive” - and herein lies the root of most problems - the world is ruined in the name of two things: profit and cost cutting.

“More expensive” - and herein lies the root of most problems - the world is ruined in the name of two things: profit and cost cutting.

Yup. Resiliency and redundancy cost a little bit more money.

I wish. Only (mostly small) tech savvy companies might maybe make that move at some point. Herd mentality and short term convenience have already won that battle. AI will only add to that since for 99.9% of people LLMs and cloud are synonyms.